Supercharge your online research with "growthscrolling"

Are you a "doomscroller?" Here's a creative alternative

Most people, when they have spare time, turn to their smartphones for mindless entertainment. They compulsively scroll through their news feeds. In the process, they soak up an endless array of bad news and may become tense, anxious or depressed.

What if you could reframe this into something that could benefit you - by making you smarter and more creative? What if you could identify useful nuggets of ideas and inspiration and capture them in a system where they could be nurtured and combined with other ideas to be even more valuable?

Musician, teacher and blogger Dr. Christopher Foley, writing in the Foley Music & Arts Blog, calls this more productive approach "growthscrolling:"

"What if you could feel the opposite of the compulsive anxiety triggered by doomscrolling? What if you could discover a reverse reaction that lowers anxiety and blood pressure while scrolling through information that helps you to feel agency, surrender and a rush of possibilities?"

Count me in!

Tools: digital note-taking

Foley's tool of choice for capturing what inspires him is a relatively new visual note-taking app called Napkin. It's not only is great for capturing ideas and inspirations any time, anywhere. It also incorporates an AI engine that analyzes your notes and automatically displays related ones on its flexible canvas interface.

This makes it easy to connect related ideas and build bigger ones out of smaller ones.

It's like serendipity on steroids!

Tools: Building a Second Brain

Another popular way to practice growthscrolling is Tiago Forte's popular Building a Second Brain (BASB). It is a personal knowledge management framework that enables you to collect ideas and information from a variety of sources and capture them in a single system.

It includes a simple but powerful process to help you capture, organize, distill and express your ideas to the world. Simply put, it can helps you be more purposeful about the information, knowledge and ideas you collect - and to make the most of them to help you solve problems and leverage new opportunities.

How can you take advantage of growthscrolling to accelerate your success?

Pick your "rabbit holes:" Become more purposeful about your searches. As you do so, don't just be a passive consumer of information. Adopt the mindset of an idea explorer. As you skim online content, ask yourself "How can I use this? How can I apply it to my current challenge?" Cultivate an "insight outlook" to uncover nuggets of ideas and inspiration and capture them in your system.

Be open to tangents: During your online explorations, don't be afraid to venture off in new directions. Creativity often comes from unrelated ideas bumping up against each other. You never know when someone's unique insight on an unrelated topic could spark a valuable new idea you can use!

Remember: To become more creative and develop a unique perspective to share with the world, you not only need to collect and connect a greater number of dots than the average person. You also need to capture a greater VARIETY of dots.

In the world of creative thinking, random stimuli can be a wonderful thing!

Get in the habit of idea capture: Many apps, including Napkin, Evernote and Notion, offer browser plug-ins that enable you to automatically capture part or all of a web page in a single click - painless idea capture!

If you think of an idea or encounter an intriguing concept during your online travels, your default mindset ought to be to capture it for future reference.

Change your search medium: Google and other search engines are very good at delivering a somewhat focused collection of web pages that may be useful to you. But they suck at helping you find new insights and ideas.

Consider using visual search tool like Answer the Public instead to power your online explorations. It displays the most common questions and concepts people search for that are related to your search term, arrayed as a radial mind map. It's designed to surface new ideas and insights.

I've used Answer the Public to brainstorm potential topics for the content it creates. It's amazing!

Periodically filter your feeds: As you scroll through your feeds and the newsletters packing your inbox, look at them with a critical eye. Which sources of information are no longer adding value? Consider eliminating them from information diet.

By all means, experiment with new sources. But be relentlessly selective about culling down the list so you can focus your limited time on the most valuable sources of ideas.

Happy growthscrolling!